Back in the 1970s, if there was a party on a Saturday night, the fly dances being done probably had been scoped out on TV that afternoon. Teenagers and their parents, too knew that being down with the latest moves and styles meant getting your ticket punched by Don Cornelius.

Cold and flu season is here, filling the streets with a great chorus of coughing, dripping, hacking, sniffling humanity. And there's one cheap, easy, clinically proven way to avoid joining them. Wash your hands.

Three platinum picks this week include a meditation on torture illuminated by the story of a framed Afghan cabdriver, a comic-book character brought to life, and a door that closes, silently, on a demoted doorman.

A slow holiday week offers a chance to take a look at box sets from the past month. Eclectic as all get out (try Yasujiro Ozu to Fred Willard), these are too rich or splashy to be ignored, given their respective fan bases.

Pham Xuan An, who led a remarkable and perilous double life as a communist spy and a respected reporter for Western news organizations during the Vietnam War, died Wednesday at age 79. An, who suffered from emphysema, died at a military hospital in Ho Chi Minh City, according to his son, Pham Xuan Hoang An.

Eddie Adams, 71, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist whose half-century of work was defined by a single frame an Associated Press photo of a communist guerrilla being executed in a Saigon street during the Vietnam War died early Sunday.